I recall reading that, although Al Capone was the boss of the Chicago Outfit, he didn’t belong to the Mafia as you had to be of Sicilian ancestry to join and he was Neapolitan.
Yet I notice in The Sopranos that Tony and many more of his guys are not Sicilians. When did they change the rules? Can anyone of Italian ancestry join now?
‘Mafia’ is the name of the organised criminal fraternity in Sicily. Whilst it has taken on a wider meaning to mean organised crime in general, to be true ‘mafia’ you would need to be Sicilian. Similar fraternities in other parts of Italy have different names. So, Al Capone, being from Naples, would be ‘Camorra’ - the Neoplitian equivalent of the Mafia.
By the way, members of the mafia and other italian organised crime fraternities apparently wouldn’t refer to themselves as ‘mafia’, which some have claimed is a literary creation. The Sicilian mafia is actually referred to, according to members who’ve turned state evidence, as ‘cosa nostra’ (note the lowercase), meaning ‘our thing’, meaning the organisation doesn’t have, or need, a name. Tony Soprano is therefore termed a mafioso by the outside world, but in real life wouldn’t refer to himself as such. He’d probably just talk about ‘the family’, or ‘the brotherhood’ or whatever.
To think of ‘the Mafia’ as one big structured organisation that italians sign up to is the mistake, really. There are numerous criminal gangs which form a kind of loose club